My own gasp left me as if my chest had been squeezed. It was cold. Definitely cold. And the pack was already trying to sink me as it dipped in the water and caught the barge’s current, almost slamming me into the algae-slick hull.
“Shit,” I said, trying to kick myself away.
“It’s okay, Tavin, just breathe,” Khaya said in her calmest voice. She had to have been as cold as I was. “You’re going to take my hand, and we’re going to duck under at the same time, then swim toward shore, got it? We need to stay under as long as we can. Remember, deep breaths.”
The barge was almost past us—it was our only cover, hiding us from the speedboats. The high-pitched hums of their motors was growing louder. I nodded, a bone-deep shiver rattling up my spine and out through my teeth.
“Okay. Last deep breath. Here we go.” She took my hand firmly and inhaled, long and deep. I did the same, filling my lungs.
And then she ducked under. I went in after her, the water closing over my head.
The world became black and icy and muffled and pressing. With one hand I paddled like mad, while the other squeezed Khaya’s hand in what must have been a painful grip. It wasn’t difficult to sink with the backpack weighing me down, and soon we were well beneath the surface, hidden from anyone who could see us, kicking as hard as we could.
Thank the Gods Khaya seemed to know where she was going, because I couldn’t see a thing. We could have been paddling right toward the speedboats for all I knew. Not that we were getting much closer to land even if we were on the right track, not at this pace. I’d seen how far we were from the dark shore before we’d ducked under. We’d be lucky if we could make it that far without drowning, let alone getting caught.
Water whirled by my ears as I swam, whistling a background tune to the throbbing beat of my heart. My lungs soon started to feel tight, and eventually, they started to burn. I squeezed Khaya’s hand urgently in the suffocating darkness.
She squeezed it tighter, holding me down.
So I kept kicking for one second, two seconds, three seconds, four … then my chest convulsed without warning, announcing that time was up, and my hand wrenched involuntarily against hers.
This time she let me pull her, and I struggled upwards harder than I’d ever struggled for anything in my life. My chest was shivering and lurching, my lungs wanting to breathe even if they took in water, especially now that I was so close to air. I tried to keep my mouth closed, pressing my shaking lips together and clenching my jaw until I thought my teeth would crack. But my mouth opened anyway—right as my head broke the surface.
I only had time for a ragged gasp of air—the most beautiful substance on Earth—before the backpack dragged me back under. Hands seized my T-shirt and yanked me back up.
I tried to stay afloat, but my body was so heavy and numb. My hands were like rigid claws that sliced and didn’t catch the water, even though I moved them faster and faster. I didn’t even care that the speedboats were no longer nearby, the green and yellow lights moving after the spotlighted bulk of the barge in the distance.
“It’s okay, Tavin, I can hold you up for a second. Just breathe.” Khaya sounded out-of-breath herself, if not quite as bad as me. Her hand clamped around my arm, lifting me, her legs kicking in a strong, smooth rhythm. “But we need to swim for shore.”
The shore was a dark line of trees and looming mountains above a vast expanse of even darker water.
“I don’t think I can make it that far,” I gasped, almost wanting to laugh at the realization. Maybe my panic was making me hysterical.
“Yes, you can,” Khaya said, as calm as ever, and then she said something I didn’t understand. Her fingertips grew warm, almost hot against my cold skin. Heat and strength buzzed through the rest of my body, like I’d tossed back a double shot of Drey’s whisky but without the sloppiness. My stomach suddenly rumbled, so loud I was surprised the speedboats didn’t hear it and turn around.
“I gave you energy, but it comes from your own body—I only put it on overdrive,” Khaya told me. “I can’t do it again or you’ll be too tired and hungry to move when this is all over.”
“If I’m still alive.” I was able to hold my head above water more easily than a second ago. My legs and arms felt warm and invigorated, but the expanse of water was as cold and wide as before, the bag just as heavy. “If this pack doesn’t kill me. I won’t be able to do a crawl stroke like this.”
“How do otters swim when they’re carrying their young?” Khaya asked.
“How the hell should I know?”
“On their backs. Do you know the backstroke?”
My jerky nod was more like a spasm. She swam behind me, helping me slide the pack from my back to my chest, looping the straps back around my shoulders. My head only went under once during the entire reshuffle. And all the while, the speedboats were heading farther and farther away from us.
“Try that,” she said. “Aim for shore.”
I leaned back in the water, kicking and doing what I was sure was the lamest backstroke ever, the straps chafing my shoulders. But it worked. I kept myself and the pack afloat at a crawling pace, my breathing just short of hyperventilation. Little rolling waves washed over my face every ten seconds or so, making me sputter and blurring my view of the night sky like stinging tears.
My muscles kept working, pumping on and on in mechanical movements, and I let my brain slip into numbness with the rest of my body. I didn’t think about the fact that I might drown at any second, because I couldn’t think. The act of swimming became everything. I couldn’t even spare any consideration for Khaya. I didn’t even know where she was.
At first, I didn’t recognize what had happened when—maybe twenty minutes later, maybe twenty hours—my stretching, paddling hands came up with fingers loaded with dark goop and my shoulders pressed into something firmer and more slippery than water, halting my endless backward motion.
Mud. I had reached the shore. My arms and legs gave out then and I dropped like a rock, my back sinking into sludge, the pack on my chest speeding the process. Luckily I was only in a couple feet of water; a foot deeper and I would have drowned. The ripples were already lapping dangerously close to my gaping mouth, and then a slightly bigger wave splashed down my throat, making me cough.
Khaya had washed up next to me. The pace of her breathing matched mine, and all either of us could seem to do was listen to ourselves gasp for several long minutes.
“I think we rinsed,” I said eventually, my lungs heaving as I hauled myself up onto my elbows. My limbs felt like melted rubber.
“What?” Khaya gasped, dragging herself farther toward the rocks leading up to the line of dark trees. Her bare arms and legs were smeared in mud—marks on her skin that were no more comprehensible than the Words on her shoulders.
“You said we needed to rinse the smells off.”
There was a pause, and then Khaya collapsed on her stomach, laughing a full, breathy laugh. It was the first time I’d heard anything like that coming from her. A grin shaped my numb face in spite of the cold—in spite of everything. I was alive, and Khaya was laughing, and that felt pretty damned good.
ten
Khaya didn’t stay down for long. “We need to move,” she said—her new mantra. She got up on her hands and knees, then stood on wobbly legs on the night-soaked lakeshore. I couldn’t remember the world ever looking so dark; never, in the glittering spread of Eden City. “Not only will the Athenaeum be tracking us soon with all the resources available to them, but we’ll get hypothermic.”
She tugged the pack off my chest, helping me up as she did, even though I nearly pulled her back down.
“It’s cold,” I said, feeling the air on my skin for the first time. Shivers took hold of me, shaking my body like a pack of gremlins. “Weird. It wasn’t cold earlier.”
“We’re well out of the city. Our weath
er pattern will no longer be regulated by Luft, so we’ll have to contend with the natural climate of this area.” Khaya’s words wavered with her own sudden shudder.
“Luft?” I asked.
“The Word of Air.”
Right. I was sure I had more questions somewhere in my numb brain, but I was too tired to dig around and find them.
“So we’ll have to stay warm and keep ourselves strong—not that you’ll have a problem with that,” she said, turning to lurch toward the trees, hauling the pack with her. I let her carry it. It was her turn, after all. “Thank you, by the way. I’m a decent swimmer, but I couldn’t have made that distance with a load like this by myself.”
“At your service, my lady,” I panted, stumbling after her, slipping on the rocks. We had to dash across a two-lane country highway, deserted at this time of night, and my knees buckled twice before I made it to the edge of the forest, but I managed not to collapse. So much for my strength. “You must have had swimming lessons in the Athenaeum.”
“Among other lessons. All the Words are highly trained. I can also play the harp and ballroom dance … and kick a man’s nose up into his brain.” She shot a glance back at me as we stepped under the cover of the trees. “Still think I’m a lady?”
I thought she must be joking until I remembered that Khaya didn’t joke.
“Why the hell do you need my help, then, if you can do all that?” A twig stabbed me in the foot, which was already aching with cold, and I tripped with a curse. I couldn’t see a thing in the underbrush. “Never mind the whole Word of Life thing.”
“Because I would never actually kick a man’s nose into his brain.” Khaya dropped the pack to the ground and fished out our sopping wet clothes and shoes. “I’m the Word of Life, not Death. And I told you, I couldn’t have done any of this without you: disguising myself in trash—twice—securing passage on the barge, or swimming while holding this pack, which is our key to survival. I couldn’t even walk yesterday, remember?”
I wasn’t used to her compliments or thanks, so I only shook my wet pants out of the bundle and grimaced as I held them up. “These are going to be cold.”
“You’ll be colder without them. Your body will warm them up … eventually,” she said, tugging her black, long-sleeved shirt over her head without expression.
I alternately hissed and yelped as I forced my legs into my frozen pants, not bothering to hide it from Khaya. She had seen me half-naked, crying, and now drowning, so I didn’t care if she saw me whining like a baby over wet clothes. I could barely feel my toes as I crammed them into my shoes.
“Faster,” Khaya said, waiting fully dressed in her black pants and shirt. “We need to find a stream. We’ll be much harder to track that way. No footprints, no smell to follow.”
“Right,” I said, tying the final knot in my wet, gritty laces. Then I straightened and threw the backpack over my aching shoulders. More like the backpack nearly overthrew me.
“Eat this.” Khaya tossed me one of the food bars from the pack.
My stomach rumbled like a truck engine as I caught it. She hadn’t taken one for herself, but that didn’t stop me. I ripped open the wrapper with my teeth and chewed half of it off in one bite.
“How are we going to find a stream?” I asked with my mouth full. “Just stumble around in the dark until we fall into one?”
“Basically,” Khaya said, starting off through the underbrush. She moved roughly parallel to the lake, though keeping a straight line was difficult through the tangle of shrubs and fallen logs. “I can’t check the map right now, because the flashlight might draw unwanted attention. But there should be tons of streams feeding Lake Léman.”
Something with thorns snagged at my pants as I followed. “Ouch. Lake Le-what?”
I mostly just wanted to talk about something. Escaping on the barge had been surreal—frightening, sure—but now, on foot, this felt all too real. I couldn’t let myself think about the fact that I was leaving the only home I’d ever known like a thief in the dark. A clumsy thief.
“Watch out for the blackberry brambles,” Khaya said, not looking back at me. “Though I hope they stay plentiful. I can force them to grow berries, even when it’s too cold and they’re not in season, like now. And Lake Léman is what Lake Eden is called outside of Eden City, in both France and Switzerland. Just like the Nectar River is also known as the Rhone. We like to rename things, even change languages. Our own English-speaking Eden City was French-speaking Geneva before we took it over a couple hundred years ago, at the turn of the nineteenth century.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know too much about what existed beyond the borders of Eden City—or even Eden City’s history—aside from the fact that there were lots of other countries out there, and Captain Crunch came from one of them.
Gods, I wanted some Captain Crunch. I tried to stop thinking about all the things I’d rather be eating and stuffed the other half of the food bar in my mouth. It tasted too healthy. Drey had long ago tried to feed me stuff like this, but had soon abandoned all hope of succeeding.
“If my memory is correct,” Khaya continued, “we need to hike southeast through these foothills into the Chablais Alps, then make our way back across the Swiss border, which shouldn’t be too far. We’ll be in the Swiss Alps after that.”
The Swiss Alps. The location of the Matterhorn and Drey’s mysterious address—a place of exile for Khaya and perhaps answers for me.
“Sounds like you had lessons in geography, too.” I stubbed my foot on a low, rotting log that was indistinguishable from the rest of the ground and I uttered a curse. “I can hardly point to Eden City on a map.” I could hardly have pointed to myself in this darkness.
“It’s in the southwestern corner of Switzerland, at the far end of Lake Ed—Léman,” Khaya said, her pace quickening ahead of me as if she had night vision. “It’s only a few miles from the French border—46.2 north by 6.15 east.”
“Way to make me feel like an ignoramus.” Drey had never wanted me to sound stupid, yet I realized he could have taught me a lot more than he had. He’d talked about faraway places, ancient legends, and distant histories. But anything recent, right next to me, was like a blank spot on a map in my brain.
Khaya actually sounded chastised. “I’m not bragging. I just know.”
Like she was just beautiful, just the Word of Life, and just knew how to kick someone’s head off—though I had yet to see that last one demonstrated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“At least one of us knows. And while being the Word of Life is cool and all,” I said with yet another shiver, “I wish you were the Word of Fire. I’m freezing my a—uh, I’m pretty cold.” I censored myself, not wanting to sound more lower class than I already did.
A light drizzle had begun working its way between tree branches, invisible in the dark and misting my face like someone’s lisping spit. It rarely rained in Eden City, only enough to give the city the occasional wash-down and water the planters and parks—thanks to the schedule maintained by the Word of Air, I now realized.
“Trust me, you don’t wish that,” Khaya said, vaulting over a log. I thought I heard a smile in her voice. “Agonya has a very short temper. She would likely have lit you on fire by now.”
“At least I would be warm,” I said, falling over the same log. “Okay, maybe I don’t want the Word of Fire. How about the Word of Electric Heaters? Or maybe the Word of Warm Coats?”
Khaya laughed again, really laughed, her voice ringing through the trees like a bell. The sound carried me up with it, making me feel like I was flying instead of crawling around in the bushes. But she swallowed her laughter nearly as soon as it had begun.
“Gods, I’m being too loud,” she said. “I must be tired.”
I hoped tiredness wasn’t the only thing letting her loosen up. “We could always stop—”
“No, we can’t,” she
said, cool and businesslike once again. “Not until sunrise. We need to get as far away as possible and take advantage of the darkness to move. And we should probably quit talking. Whether or not they know how we got out of the city, they’ll soon realize we’re not there, and then they’ll be combing the countryside for us—especially the lakeshore along the barge’s route.”
We stopped speaking after that, trekking in a silence that was complete aside from the occasional snapping twig or whispered curse when I tripped. Or the low growls from my stomach. The food bar only helped for about a half hour before I was ravenous again. Khaya was right—the boost of energy she’d given me in the river had definitely come from my body, and now it was demanding repayment, with interest. I didn’t want to stop to unpack another bar, because I didn’t know how many we had. Even if they tasted bad, they were our only food. And I was pretty sure Khaya would leave me behind at the pace she was going. I’d never encountered such darkness or silence in my life, and didn’t exactly want to be lost in it.
About a half hour or so after we’d started walking, we still hadn’t come across a stream but we’d nearly stumbled into the backyards of a few country houses. I was about to ask Khaya if her knowledge of geography was all that sophisticated when the sound of running water rose through the trees.
“Finally,” Khaya said.
The stream appeared, a braid of shimmering darkness through the underbrush, about as wide as a street. I thought it would be easier going once we hit the stream, but when I saw Khaya go perfectly still as she stepped into the water, shoes and all, I knew I was in for some extreme discomfort. Khaya always seemed to act the calmest when things were the worst. Sure enough, when I trundled in after her, I swore loud enough to earn a glare and a finger held to her lips for silence.
“Sorry,” I hissed as she stepped behind me to unzip the backpack, “but it’s like ice water. Or fire. My feet are burning!”
She didn’t answer, just filled the water bottle, which had a filter in the cap, then shot several blasts of liquid into her mouth before handing it to me. I didn’t think I wanted any more water touching me until I sprayed some in my mouth and realized I was dying of thirst. Then I couldn’t get enough. All too soon, Khaya was repacking the bottle and starting upstream ahead of me.
Wordless Page 9